Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (“UAV”) technologies are becoming increasingly popular in a broad range of applications. Upon completing a functional mission and needing to be recharged or reloaded, the UAV is landed onto a designated location, such as a docking station or a ground station. Nowadays, processes of automatically operated UAVs are in great demand as the UAVs can perform more and more missions.
Due to a short history of the UAV, there are relatively few approaches available in the market for landing the UAV onto the designated docking station in supporting the automatically operated UAVs. Currently-known landing schemes are generally either traditionally reverse-triangle positioning approaches or a positioning realized based on transmission of downward views from the UAV to decide a position of a camera lens installed on the UAV.
The reverse-triangle positioning approach relies on a physical shape of the landing dock to cooperate with the UAV. A landing dock of a funnel shape is generally applied to lead the UAV to slide onto the docking station. However, because the reverse-triangle approach needs the UAV to be positioned in an area of an opening of the funnel in order for the UAV to slide in, this approach requires a small margin for landing error. Therefore, this approach requires for a landing area big enough to realize stable landing of the UAV. Furthermore, uncontrollable contacts between the funnel and the UAV may result in damage to fragile parts of the UAV.
On the other hand, the down-viewing positioning approach requires extra equipment arrangements to conduct the landing, including at least a visual element and a calculation module. To meet the requirements for landing the UAV, a high precision visual element and a high performance processing module are usually required. Generally, high precision visual elements and high performance processing modules are big and heavy, which can detriment the mounting ability of the UAV.
In view of the foregoing reasons, there is a need for systems and methods for landing an automatically operated UAV to a designated area with less restricted landing area requirements and with smaller and lighter additions for the landing.